


Red Sky at Morning

by HestiasHearth



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Gen, Mind Control/Manipulation, Non-Graphic Rape/Non-Con, Slavery, easy to skip; you'll have a warning
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-03-09
Updated: 2016-06-08
Packaged: 2018-05-25 18:51:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,061
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6206476
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/HestiasHearth/pseuds/HestiasHearth
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The rebellion is dead. Your son is dead. It seems you are the only thing that is not. </p><p>Your name, rather fittingly, is the Mother of Sorrows, and this is your story. What's left of it.</p><p>((READ PLS: okay, so, this was my first work on AO3. It was going to feature doomed timelines, and a mutiny, and a second revolution, and generally be fucking awesome. I'm going to write that story eventually. There will be elements of this one. This work, however, wound up being a two-chapter meander-y adventure into depression, and that's probably all it is, in this iteration. Please enjoy! And expect a better Red Sky version some time far in the future. This version will likely remain incomplete, and is not my proudest work, but I'm sentimental.))</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Perpetuity

**Author's Note:**

> Hello! This is my first AO3 work, and my first published fanfiction at all in many, many years. With that in mind, I'm more than open to any comments or constructive criticism.
> 
> I can't say for sure when this will update, because this is all of it I have written so far and I am a fairly busy college student. That said, I'll do my best not to keep you waiting - and thanks for sticking it out.

The Marquise has big plans for you tonight, so you’re told, and you nod dumbly and let her thoughts sweep over yours. _Happy, you’re happy_. And you nod, not because it’s true but because it’s the closest you can get, and so you let her in with practiced ease. 

But there are just a few chores for you first, my dear, and then we can have our time. She tells you you’re happy over the chores, too, and so you can’t complain; it’s all the same to you. If you overthink the reasons, you’ll start wanting to fight her influence again. And you’re too old to fight, you’re too tired. This is best.

The ship must be in perfect condition. You stumble and she yanks some of that comfort back from you - all in good time, my dear, you’ll get what you earn.

You scrub the floors more quickly, and your fingers burn until you feel little else.

 

* * *

 

 ==> Who are you?

You have had many names throughout your life. Firstly Porrim, and then various bastardizations thereof throughout the caverns. Ordinarily, your sisters would have chosen a title for you, once you came of age. It was a supposed sign of jadeblooded solidarity - more likely yet another way to keep you even further removed from the outside world, from independence, from a sense of self rather than community.

However, unfortunately for tradition, you were unavailable on your tenth wriggling day. Halfway across the wastes, with a child in tow.

Since then you’ve taken it upon yourself to find a name. The first, and longest lasting, was Mother. You gave no name in town, you couldn’t afford reputation or recognition, so he was the only one who needed something to call you by. And the name of the beast that raised you, who you tore open in order to create new life, seemed oddly fitting. Later you would be known as a Heretic, as an Advocate, as a Disciple - a Disciple, yes, though that name would become synonymous with Meulin with time. But these were all, so far as you were concerned, names, and they came and went as those around you saw fit.

The title you’ve taken now is the only one that’s fitting. You are named for the Mother of Sorrows herself: a cautionary tale, to young jades who let their heart rule before their mind, who would rather learn to hold grubs than a knife and who would let them die in the trials before sparing them the pain, who named them too early, who didn’t heed the others’ warnings to stay detached and who shrivelled up into nothing more than a wilting flower, overcome by the attachments she’d been warned never to make. A story from your wrigglerhood, and a warning you’d tossed to the wind.

Whether she was real before is uncertain, as is all of your people’s lore, but one thing you know, and that is that you _are_ the Dolorosa. Perhaps it had been a prophecy, waiting to come true.

You’d never believed in prophets in your youth. But you’ve learned.

The difference from the story to reality is that you are not allowed to curl up in your sorrow, you are not allowed to stop living. By all functional definitions, of course, you have. You rarely feel, and you are all but unable to discern what of that feeling is real and what is her. You rarely say a word - sweeps ago, that wasn’t true, but all of your crewmates have heard his story, you can do no more to preserve his memory, and so you have no reason to speak. But despite your best efforts, you have yet to become nothing.

To be clear, you do not envy your son’s death. But you have spent many nights wishing you could have gone in his stead - and, once it sunk in how cruel it was to let a mother or son live on, spent many, many more nights wishing you could have simply gone with him.

But no. You are to carry on, degraded, a husk of what you once were. Made up of memories and stories that no longer feel like your own, of sorrow at first and then later simple emptiness. 

It’s hell.

You can only imagine what your other dear children must be going through. Because they always seemed to feel just a little more intensely, because you knew they likely wouldn’t give up on mourning just yet.

That’s not to say you’ve stopped mourning. No, no, you are mourning’s living incarnation, if grief could walk this Alternia it would be as you. But you, unlike them, can no longer cry. You mourn for your son, for your family, for yourself, for what the world lost that night, but you unlike them can no longer find it painful.

Acceptance is a stage of grief, but that does not mean it is over.

Who are you, then? You are someone, still, despite your prayers. You are the Dolorosa, you are a vessel, once for his story, and now for her.

 

* * *

 

What will you do?


	2. Porrim ==> Remember

When you were captured, no one quite knew what to do with you.

Wounds were inflicted on you during your torture which should have killed you. Which, in fact, _had_ killed you, only to leave you to rise still-breathing not one minute later. The Highbloods cried blasphemy, but little could be done for it – it is not often that the Empire finds a rainbowdrinker in its custody. So as far as they were aware, so far as most legends told, you could not be killed.

You likewise could not be sent back to the caverns. That is not because they didn’t believe it to be a punishment; they’re as aware as you are that laboring over the incestuous slurry is not as elevated a privilege as it has been held up to be. It is because there you would be a threat. The official word delivered to the caverns when your son's fame began to rise was that just nights after her departure, Porrim Maryam (which one? the girl sent for water, ah yes) had been unfortunately found dead; a shame this news travels so slowly. Any newcomers that might say otherwise would be young enough to be better seen and not heard, and so the caverns have been deprived of news for generations, and so they will continue to be deprived of yours.

What would befall this planet should the matrons realize they can stand up and leave?

You could be forced to watch your children die, the two useless ones anyway. And you were forced to watch one, and that was more than you could bear, but it was a punishment and a punishment alone, not any way to control you. If anything your anger after that night made you more dangerous, and more of a problem waiting to be solved.

You could be kept in the cold cells below the Church. Could have been a plaything, perhaps to the Grand Highblood himself if he was interested. It was an option he had debated with Meulin. But you were too old to suit his tastes, and the Messiahs (so you're told) had no use for a jade, and evidently there was no other such religious official worthy of your service as a political gift.

With all options exhausted, it was an inconvenience to everyone that you had to be sold.

And an endless, humorless irony that you were sold to the Marquise.

She did not buy her slaves in person, to be clear. She is brash, egotistical, prepared to flaunt safety and what society would tell her in a way you cannot bring yourself to respect (and force yourself not to find familiar, it's not, she is nothing like him). Bold, self-assured, obnoxious, she will take any opportunity to spit in the Empire's face but she is no fool.

No, she is a fool, but she is not suicidal.

You were bought not by her but by the highest-blooded slave in her service, and at first the auctioneer had thought it a joke - you went for a hefty price. But the money was all there, counted coin-by-coin in front of you, the salesman's face twisted in a far-too-amused smile.

Even with the money there, you were being sold by an indigo and bought by a green, he had no obligation to accept the bid. The sale was only approved for the sake of your own humiliation. A jade, owned by an olive. You have no doubt some still laugh at the indecency of it.

The Empire laughs at their jokes, and the Marquise laughs at hers, because here you are stolen away from one traitor and immediately sold into the service of another. In that way you are something of a trophy. You have never been sure if she realizes the irony in believing that she's somehow conned the Empire, that any goal has been thwarted with the rebellion still crushed and you still paid for and punished, but you know she would not care. She gets her laugh, and if prompted you laugh with her, and if not you say nothing. 

 

* * *

 

When he was younger, you thought your son suffered dayterrors. You thought this because at nights - you both were diurnal, then - he would sit up in his spot, stare around himself for a moment, and scream.

When you asked him why he would not speak to you. When you asked him the next day he would smile and apologize for the fright. It was sweeps later that he explained that his dreams were not what scared him, they were peaceful, wonderful things. Normal, he'd say.

It was sweeps later when he explained that those nights he was waking up from dreams of peace, and remembering that instead he was here. Alternia. Where people kill other people and care is a luxury, and these are facts you knew and found normal. You never understood it, but the sheer concept of this place, of his very existence as a part of something so very  _wrong,_  overwhelmed him. Like that place from before was the right one, he said. And Alternia was the one the horrorterrors had warped, changed to something nightmarish and still disturbingly real. And he was a child, and so there was nothing more he could do for it than cry and scream.

Perhaps that's all he could ever do for it. When he was older, he would fight for that place, risk what little the four of you had to maybe make this world a little less unbearable - and in the last image you have of him all he could do was cry and scream and swear that world had happened, swear the dreams had mattered.

You think you are beginning to understand him, now.

The way you see it, for those sweeps with your children you were dreaming. At first they were as incredible as the world he told you of, full of a love you had never imagined yourself capable of knowing. And then they became - what was the word he could say? - almost normal.

You wish you could bring yourself to cry, to scream. You swear those sweeps had mattered.

But instead they were a pleasant moment away from reality. A part of your life, and not the defining one, and not the longest. You could pretend otherwise, but you were hatched into servitude for the Empire and spent it on ideas that were morally wrong, you were sold into servitude against the Empire and will spend it on a woman who is just as wrong, and the only person you ever chose to serve is dead.

It occurs to you some times that those sweeps could have been spent on you. But that's selfish. Besides, in their own way they were yours, really. You don't think you would be able to love someone without some element of servitude; you don't think, for all your activism, that you really know how to live for yourself. But for a brief moment you lived, at least, for each other.

You swear that world happened.

You swear those sweeps had mattered.

Your fingers are burning and your knuckles are raw, the Marquise still gets her laugh and you don't, so that really changes nothing.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> If anyone feels this story should be tagged for "implied/heavily implied depression," let me know. It wasn't my intent to write a story about depression, but to some extent, you know, the characters write themselves, and that seems to be writing itself right in. I am in full support of warnings where they're needed.
> 
> As always, comments are welcome <3


End file.
